Runaway
by droogish
Summary: Five years on, Blair asks and Dan agrees. Post season five with a few season six elements.


Blair used to enjoy Chuck's secrets. It added to the air of mystique that always seemed to surround him. She played his games, knew his secrets, teased, provoked him with them. But five years on, the secrets are wearing. They're a weight around her shoulders, the blood on her hands invisible to all except her.

Chuck doesn't care. Chuck does everything he possibly can to not think about Bart Bass. Blair wants to be like that too. So she lets Chuck think she didn't notice the rumpled looking secretary passing her on the stairs to the penthouse; washes the cheap perfume out of their sheets and scrubs at the lipstick marks on his collar (how _common_) until her hands are red raw.

Blair is 26, married and trapped. And it's not like it's the first time.

* * *

Dan lives with Serena. They tried again, they failed again, except this time they don't have the energy to look hurt or surprised. Instead they fell back into an easy routine. That spark was still there, bubbling beneath the surface, and Dan supposed it always would be. Sometimes the spark erupts, resulting in them falling into bed, her breath on his neck and his hands digging into her hips. Most of the time though, they co-habit. They talk (Serena talks – Dan listens, nods and tunes out), they eat, they laugh.

Serena lives. Dan is content with simply existing.

* * *

Blair is the one who writes now. It's never published with her name on it; she has a pseudonym, the witty and astute fashion spy for Vogue online. Waldorf-Bass designs is officially hers, but Chuck's long-lost sister (that came as a surprise to everyone except Blair. I mean really, who didn't think there was a baby tucked away somewhere on the other side of the world with the Bass genes?) runs everything. Blair doesn't design. She never wanted to design. She Skypes her mother and Cyrus and gushes about how well the company is going and how Eleanor will just _love_ this winter's burgundy shift dress and all the time she wants to scream about how this is so so wrong, this isn't her, she wants to escape, she's so unhappy it hurts, she watched her husband watch a man beg for his life and then fall and she wants to tell, she really does, but she can't. She's his _wife,_ for better or worse.

She just doesn't know when the 'better' part will start.

* * *

Dan doesn't write. Well, not novels. Sometimes when he wakes in the night and he can't sleep, he scribbles stories of captured dark haired maidens with Stockholm syndrome, and blondes who are light and airy but are really just as fucked up as the rest of them, but he's a reporter now. It's just for a local paper, the odd freelance commission here and there, and Dan gets by. He visits the hipster bookstores and cafes that his 16 year old self visited (ironically, of course) and he writes about the people he sees. Maybe it's the elderly lady who runs the charity shop on the corner who listens to people pour their hearts out. Or the pretty young waitress who is hopelessly in love with her manager. Everyone in New York has a story. And he tells it for them, while keeping his own locked away in his room. In his heart.

* * *

Blair tries to run away on her 27th birthday. There's a room full of people, only a handful that she knows, only two that she'd really want to speak to, and she wants out.

She creeps out of the room, is halfway down the concrete steps when she runs straight into Humphrey.

It's the same place she had her wedding reception to Louis. The irony isn't lost on either of them.

Once again, she asks. And once again, he agrees.

* * *

"Where are you going?"

"Anywhere. Everywhere. Somewhere that isn't here"

He swallows.

"Want some company?"

* * *

After a mission to the Basses penthouse that he thinks James Bond would be proud of, he swings the car in front of his and Serena's flat. She follows him up – she didn't ask and he didn't invite, but really, did he expect any different? – and sits, prim and proper on his and Serena's tatty leather sofa as he dashes around looking for clothes.

"Still the pretentious one, Humphrey" she calls out.

He looks up, sees her rifling through his bookshelves, and the scene is so horribly familiar that he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

He settles for zipping the bag.

"Ready?"

She smiles at him and he feels it like a punch in the gut.

"Always"

* * *

(This was just what happened when I took a break from revision. A few elements, like Bart, are from season six, but the majority of the story will be based post season five finale because really, we can all write sucky fanfic, just CW don't pay us to do so)


End file.
